Community arts and music, community media: cultural politics and policy in 

Britain since the 1960sMckay, GA

Title Community arts and music, community media: cultural politics and policy in Britain since the 1960s

Authors Mckay, GA

Type Book Section

URL This version is available at: http://usir.salford.ac.uk/2813/

Published Date 2010

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COMMUNITY ARTS AND MUSIC, COMMUNITY MEDIA

Cultural Politics and Policy in Britain Since the 1960s

George McKay

The process of communication is in fact the process of community.

—Raymond Williams (quoted in Everitt, 1997, p. 80)

This chapter considers ways in which “community” has been understood and constructed in arts

and media movements concerned with a progressive social change agenda in Britain since the

counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. This will help us understand what the meanings of the

term community are in today’s cultural economy. Kevin Howley (2005) writes of having once

“disappeared down . . . [a] rabbit hole” in his efforts at definition, pointing out that “the difficulties

associated with adequately defining the term ‘community’ have confounded the study of

community media” (p. 5). This is not, though, unique to community media—as Anthony Everitt

(1997) has pointed out, in the arts world from the 1970s on, “the word ‘community’ became

increasingly problematic” (p. 85). By the mid-1990s, even the specific constituency of community

musicians, at a conference hosted by Community Music East, and titled The Voice in Community

Music Seminar, could come to

no consensus on the definition of “the community,” or indeed, who should define

it. . . . Boundaries are contestable and difficult to set. . . . Generally, people thought

it better to resist such definitions as they could become straitjackets. (p. 85)

The introductory sentences to Petra Kuppers and Gwen Robertson’s (2007) The Community

Performance Reader confess, “A sentence that starts ‘Community performance is . . .’ should,

arguably, begin this book. Trying to finish that sentence, however, is no easy matter” (p. 1). For

other community artists, the term’s definitional looseness has been viewed less as a constriction

and more as a strategic opportunity—so Anne Cahill (1998) in the context of community music in

Australia has sought to uncover and exploit any “advantage in the fuzziness” of definitions of

“community” (p. 6).

Let us revisit the question of “community”—and to make it less complex, my view will be

taken from those working in the fields of community arts, music, and media over the decades, that

is, from the ways in which workers and participants in these movements, primarily in Britain, have

themselves understood and employed, and possibly strategically redefined, the term. This, I think,

will be useful—not least as, a couple of pages after his lagomorphic experience, Howley (2005)

writes of community media as “efforts to reclaim [italics added] the media” (p. 20), while Everitt

(1997) has described community music as a sociocultural project aimed at “the re-creation [italics

added] of community” (chap. 4; ). Such “re-”s as these may suggest a Golden Age, or a nostalgia,

but they also signal for us the essential requirement to look back, to historicize.

The chapter originates with a concern that the contemporary use of “community” masks a

depoliticization of once radical projects or a dilution of their legacy. In exploring connections

between community media and social change, I have been interested in ways in which the

alternative media movement from the 1960s on has maintained a presence within—or been erased

from—the rise of community media. Many community media organizations do articulate their roles

in ways that might have sounded familiar to some of their alternative media antecedents. For

instance, the director of the Hereford-based Rural Media Company, Nic Millington, explains the

rationale of its activities as being “personal empowerment [of its users] and social change [italics

added]” (quoted in Waltz, 2005, p. 33). The adequacy of the critical position—or suspicion—of

depoliticization is interrogated by looking at issues including the following: community arts and

music, community media post-1997 in Britain, and interrogating “community” in the context of

soft capital. It should be clear that my approach to this media topic is not via media history, policy,

or institutions, but instead springs from an interest in the cultural politics and history of community

arts and music. From this perspective, I hope to identify and explore what I think of with only some

awkwardness as the nonmedia side of community media. I am not so concerned with community

media as a contemporary practice and form of organization of media production and consumption;

rather, I am interested in viewing it in relation to other forms of cultural and countercultural work

that have been (or claimed to be) located in the community.

Community Arts and Media From the 1960s On

Primarily, I am concerned with the community arts movement of the 1960s on, the rise of

community music in the 1980s and its continued presence in the 21st century, and the extraordinary

explosion of what can legitimately be termed the community media movement from the 1990s on.

The most obvious thread connecting these, of course, is the term, the claim, the desired object, the

problem of “community” itself, and I aim to historicize “community” within the cultural production

and participation of these movements. Also, though it needs contextualizing for each cultural

practice as well as for each period, “community” is constructed differently through music than it is

through media (of course); but, furthermore, it carries different meanings in the 1960s than it does

in the 2000s. Both cultural and social contexts signify. In his influential book The Politics of

Performance, Baz Kershaw (1992) has traced what he acknowledges as a “somewhat circuitous

route” of influence across the decades and across community cultural formations alike,

by creating “models for cultural action” within the counter-cultures, which then

spread through their networks to influence cultural practices in other spheres,

alternative theatre made significant contributions to the changing patterns of

cultural production generally. Thus, mid-1970s experiments in participatory

community theatre in part provided models for the community activist movement

which in the 1980s influenced many local authorities to adopt culturally

democratic policies. (p. 254)

Notwithstanding the qualifications and occasional hesitancies in this provisional chart of

influence—perhaps, textual symptoms of the uncertainty of the community arts movement during

the “mean hard times” of the early 1990s in which Kershaw was writing—my argument is that it is

possible to extend the trajectory into the later 1990s and beyond, within the different cultural

contexts of community music and media. As a specific example to illustrate this from Britain,

consider an organization such as the London Musicians’ Collective (LMC), founded in 1976 in a

late gasp of the countercultural enthusiasm for improvised and experimental sonicities and

performances, the anarchopolitics of mutual aid, and cultural activism—another strand of which

was contemporaneously giving rise to a significant sector of the community music movement. The

LMC grabbed the opportunity to move into community media as it developed in the late 1990s, to

form Resonance FM, a groundbreaking Restricted Service License radio and Internet station

playing and commissioning experimental music, sound art, and left-field documentaries (see Atton,

2004; McKay, 2005). A cultural curiosity and openness to collaboration characterized many who

worked in community arts and experimentation, which also meant that, on a pragmatic level, when

new opportunities or technologies became available—in performance, music, or media, as well as

in arts and education funding—these could be explored and exploited. Clive Bell (quoted in

McKay, 2005) describes the cross-cultural mid-1970s context that saw the establishment of the

LMC:

Improvisers were dipping their fingers into many of the pies of mixed media,

dance, film, and performance art. And in fact at this time, just before punk and its

DIY ethic erupted, there was a remarkable burst of energy in the underground arts

scene. Dancers founded the X6 Dance Collective and the New Dance magazine at

Butlers Wharf, while film makers the London Film Makers Co-op[erative]. (p.

233)

In fact, the LMC could trace its provenance back to

the alternative culture of London in the latter part of the 1960s, intrinsic to a wider

cultural explosion in the arts which was characterised by the music and happenings

of the UFO club, and the diversity of theatre, performance and poetry readings.

(Reynolds, 2007, p. 158)

That is, the counterculture included important innovations within the organization and production

of media more widely than simply the generally acknowledged significance of the underground

press of the time. In due course, the LMC’s in-house magazine, Resonance, gave its title in turn to

Resonance FM—a media development made possible not only by funding and policy shifts but also

by the digital expertise of some of the experimental musicians as well as the flexibility of such

cultural workers to adapt. Here we need to acknowledge the savviness or survival instinct of the

cultural worker at the margins when sensing a new funding pot. It is just such diachronic

(sometimes micro-)narratives of cultural and social radicalism that matter, for they speak to us of

ways in which notions and practices such as political idealism, the operation of culture for social

change, subcultural contumacy not only survive but adapt and, perhaps, even thrive across decades

and generations (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1. London Musicians’ Collective’s magazine, Resonance, Anniversary Edition, 2000:

Bridging Radical Music (1970s), Print Media (1980s), Community Radio (2000s)

There are many precedents for the idea of community arts, but, as with other postwar areas

of experimentation in life and culture, the events of one recent decade in particular do have to be

acknowledged. According to Vicky White (quoted in Moser & McKay, 2005):

The 1960s could be regarded as the true beginning of the community arts

movement and it sought to challenge the prevalent standards and assumptions

about the value of art but found itself judged against them anyway . . . These

pioneers wanted participation and relevance for the people as a whole. But they

found themselves having to be judged within the standards set by larger

organisations and funders within the dominant . . . The participants and instigators

saw [the community arts movement] as giving people a voice as it was used not

only for social means but also for political demonstrations. It saw itself as anti-

institutional and it used arts to effect social change. (p. 63)

What this new generation of socially committed community artists viewed as more

traditional questions of cultural value were “sidestepped by an emphasis on process rather than

product. To offer a ‘product’ was to enter the capitalist world of production and to accept the very

notion of professionalism which it was the community artist’s task to subvert” (Everitt, 1997, p. 83)

(Figure 3.2) In part because of such a critical stance toward established arts organizations, as well

as strands of elitism and self-interest from the latter, there was a certain amount of mutual distrust,

even antagonism, between cultural or countercultural workers and some funding bodies. Despite

this, in Kershaw’s (1992) view,

By 1970 the key ideological, organisational and aesthetic features of the . . .

community theatre movement were relatively easy to detect. Whether organised

for touring or resident projects, the groups worked outside the existing theatre

system in venues where their counter-cultural message would be welcomed.

Relationships between performers and audience, and between companies and

communities, were characterised by a new directness. This aimed to both de-

mystify the art form, especially to strip it of its mystique of professionalism, and to

promote greater equality between the stage and the auditorium. (p. 103)

Figure 3.2. Community Music East 1989 to 1993 Report, Showing George McKay on Bass,

Running a Workshop

Yet for all their radicalism from the 1970s on, community arts generally relied on local and

national government or arts organizations and sympathetic charities for funding. In the 1980s, for

example, a national scheme called the Community Programme was a government initiative aimed

at reducing (many said massaging) registered unemployment figures by establishing projects across

the community. (This could include anything from teaching water safety in schools, to improvised

music in youth centers, to providing gardening and landscape services in neglected parks or for

families on benefit.) Like me, Dave Price was a community musician then:

In 1989, community music often defined itself in oppositional terms. We didn’t

quite know what we were, but we were sure that we were not formalized

education, nor were we anything to do with the dominant ideology. Indeed some of

us (somewhat grandiosely, it must be admitted) saw ourselves as acting in open

defiance of the [right wing, conservative] Thatcher administration . . . How things

have changed . . . It is a remarkable transformation . . . [caused significantly by]

the willingness of the 1997-elected Labour Government to establish a dialogue

with artists, educators and social scientists in addressing . . . “social exclusion.”

(quoted in Moser & McKay, 2005, p. 67)

The centrality of arts within the community was then recognized by the 1997 and

subsequent Labour administrations as part of the equation seeking to address issues of social

exclusion and urban regeneration, as a report to the Social Exclusion Unit for the Department of

Culture, Media and Sport articulated in 1999: “Arts . . . are not just an ‘add-on’ to regeneration

work. They are fundamental to community involvement and ownership of any regeneration

initiative when they offer means of positive engagement in tune with local interests” (quoted in

Moser & McKay, 2005, p. 67). Of course, there are more negative readings of such arts-oriented

regeneration policies, whereby “cultural strategies work as a ‘carnival mask,’ . . . and conceal—and

even increase—the growing social inequality, polarization, and conflict within cities” (Stanziola,

1999, p. 6). Nonetheless, in Britain, this new language of community arts has indeed translated into

concrete action so that in the past few years, the quantity of community music and community

media activity across the country has developed impressively, with significant investment and

support, and the recognition of the need for a network and infrastructure. It is in this context that

Everitt (1997) speaks of “the subsidy revolution” (chap. 8).

The Congregationist Imperative

Most community arts define “community” by their very act of constructing it in the moment of

performance: the community comes together, is invented or strengthened temporarily, as a special

group event, in the form of the performers (choir, big band, theatre ensemble) and (usually) of the

audience. Kuppers and Robertson’s (2007) definition has a very simple starting point: “the

audience—the community” (p. 2). The spectated performance (rather than, say, a studio-based

music recording) takes place in a particular group location: a village hall, a town square, a

procession along a promenade, an ad hoc theatre. The artistic project itself—song cycle, play, or

other event—combines with the performance in a bringing and coming together of people in a local

space, often within a narrative of site specificity. This is the congregationist imperative of

community arts as opposed to the more mediated “non-social form[s] of participation” (Everitt,

1997, p. 24). (I am conscious here of trying to avoid reaffirming what Shirley A. White [1994] has

memorably called “participatory euphoria” [p. 18].) The sense of locality is often emphasized in the

narrative or subject materials of the event being centered on the local environment itself—so a

community play set in a particular village will tell the story of that village. Kershaw (1992) outlines

some of the other “interactive techniques” employed in the congregationist imperative, including

those

drawn from popular historical genres such as pantomime and music hall; through

techniques derived from the popular media of comic-strips, film animation, cinema

and television which encouraged more active approaches to the reading of

performance; through the adaptation of environmental forms such as fun-fairs and

festivals to produce the sensory, wrap-around effects of psychedelic spectacles;

through the physical participation of the audience in the action of the show,

reminiscent of the techniques of “primitive” rituals. (p. 103)

The desire for community through culture and congregation is also evident in Britain in the

phenomenal success and expansion of festival culture in recent years: Commonly understood as a

sociocultural practice of the transatlantic 1960s, pop festivals have absolutely thrived as a seasonal

experience of British youth and weekend counterculturalists to the extent that in the 2000s festival

culture is debatably more widespread (if by and large less edgy and socially radical) than at any

previous time in its half-century history (see McKay, 2000, 2004). Instances of congregationalism

such as community arts and pop festival culture are partly about place but in their contemporary

manifestations are also sociocultural responses to the perceived atomizing effects of the

technologies of the digital era. They work in part by blurring the distinction between participant

and observer—communities performing themselves (rather than sitting watching professional

actors playing their life roles or histories), musicians playing and learning with and from each other

(the workshop as social music making), festivalgoers being their own story (the crowd and

temporary community of audience rather than bands on stage as the pivotal festival experience).

Other cultural workers view the notion of locating cultural practice within a specific

community as itself inherently restricting, as one closing down as many options as it may open up.

Working from an elite music education institution in London, and in the context of orchestral

music, Peter Renshaw (quoted in Everitt, 1997) warns against fetishing place:

Community music is much too rooted in locality, to place in a narrow sense. . . .

This means that it doesn’t really “empower,” for it locks people into their cultural

relativity, even if it does politically “empower.” There is little sense of wider

standards. (p. 85)

Such critiques can be extended from debates about cultural values into a social or world

view—where the privileged “local” or community orientation is from another, more critical

perspective parochial or even functionally exclusive. (Social phenomena such as xenophobia and

nationalism are often cited in debates about the reactionary potential of “community”; see Delanty,

2007.) As Chris Atton (2004) has noted in another countercultural context (following John

Downing), there can be the danger of “the ‘locked circuit’ of alternative-media participation, in

which activists ‘colonise’ the alternative media, closing off access to both non-activist sources and

non-activist audiences” (p. 52). This is more than the familiar accusation of the “alternative ghetto”

(see Atton, 2002, pp. 33–35), or of niche interest groups preaching to the converted, since it

suggests an active exclusivity and silence on the part of the countercultural sector that so often

claims to be precisely giving voice.

To what extent is the congregationist imperative central to community media, though? By

extension, are we looking at a different understanding in the context of media, rather than theatre or

music, of what “community” means and how it is constructed? Even—Do community media in

some formal ways actually work against the congregationist imperative and undermine the

(potentially, whether problematically or radically) nostalgic reclamation of community that earlier

(or other) community movements may be predicated on? Of course, media scholars have explored

widely ways in which dispersed or apparently individuating media forms, such as broadcasting or

the Internet, have successfully constructed or reformatted community in their audiences—the

viewing public, local radio, the chat room, or social networking, for instance. Other work has

focused on communities of interest, rather than ones spatially defined. Furthermore, community

media, too, can claim a similar sociocultural tactic as community arts and festivals—a certain

blurring of categories between production and consumption. Indeed, Howley (2005) argues that this

is central to community media’s political impact: “By collapsing the distinction between media

producers and media consumers . . . community media provide empirical evidence that local

populations do indeed exercise considerable power at precisely the lasting and organizational

levels” (p. 3). But what I have argued here is that there is an important initial distinction around the

social act of congregation to be made within this specific context of community arts in relation to

community media, even if it is a distinction made to be subsequently problematized. Where the

production and dissemination of community arts and music are compellingly congregationist,

community media and their various technologies do not rely on that same simple tactic. This

matters precisely because of that same primary word, community, and what it might be claiming—

that is, how the secondary words (community arts, community music, community media) change

the meaning and the experience of community.

Yet today, it is in the localizing impulse, at the local level of organization and reportage,

that community media practice is identifiable and efficacious. One of the shifts in our

understanding of community has been as a result of globalization discourse, in which community is

often presented as under threat, to the extent that, in Howley’s (2005) view, community media are

“a dynamic response to the forces of globalization” (p. 33). Here, the developments of the media

industries in recent decades have had an impact on notions of community that distinguish

community media from community arts more generally in two important ways. First, the intense

concentration of global media technologies into a relatively small number of very powerful

transnational corporations is an altogether more radical economic and cultural shift than has been

seen across the music (some aspects of the pop industry notwithstanding) and arts worlds generally.

Second, the media plays a more pivotal role in directly disseminating and shaping political

discourse on a daily basis: With some exceptions, even at their most engaged, music and arts

(community or otherwise) make interventions into agendas that are set elsewhere—sometimes by

the media and always through it. I would argue that community arts and music can also be read as

dynamic responses to globalization, of course—aspects of the sociocultural desire to (re)inscribe

the local—though, perhaps, they were a little earlier than community media to the debating

chamber or barricade, and perhaps, too, they were less complicit than media in causing the problem

(if such it is) of globalization in the first place.

Other “Communities,” Other “Community Media”

There is something irresistible about “community,” for it can function as an ideologically blank

template to be shaped from above as well as below, from right and left (and any “postideological”

or third-way destabilization of such positions). It is a zone of contestation—never more apparent in

a British political context than in the startling alternative use of “community” by the Conservative

government of Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s. Here “community” entered the political lexicon

and produced a heated (and sometimes hated) response from left-wing activists and citizens alike.

The introduction of new arrangements for collecting local council rates was formally termed by the

government the “community charge.” Because of links between a new register for tax collection

and the electoral register, and also drawing on British radical history—the uprising against a

previous tax in 1381, activists called it the “poll tax.” Oppositional tactics to it included mass civil

disobedience and boycott campaigns around the slogan “Can’t pay won’t pay” as well as a high-

visibility public riot in London in 1990. The abolition of the tax was announced the following year

(a few months after Mrs. Thatcher had resigned her premiership). Such use of “community” was

widely understood at the time as an instance of political doublespeak and has remained in the

activist memory—like the Peasants’ Revolt of 600 years earlier, which was referenced by anti–poll

tax campaigners. Also, though, activists themselves sought to reclaim the term from the right: In

Scotland, the primary anarchist-influenced organization against the tax named itself Community

Resistance (Burns, 1992, pp. 32–33), while in Trafalgar Square, London, one banner’s slogan

instructed simply, “COMMUNITIES . . . CHARGE!” (Anonymous, 1990, p. 33). In this profound

moment, the very notion of “community,” and indeed the actual term itself, was at the heart of the

political struggle.

Other, less dramatic manifestations of community—now in the specific context of media—

can further complicate the social activist impulse that we have identified as a core feature of the

community arts movement historically and that is often claimed in the community media field, too.

From the apparent soft sell of big business’s charity donations to the discourse of corporate social

responsibility, we should ask questions about what might be termed community capitalism and the

complicity of certain forms of media in it. This can be seen equally in local and global contexts.

Locally, for example, a key Web site address—www.communitymedia.co.uk—is registered to, and

is also the business place of, a British company called Community Media, which produces and sells

marketing materials. These marketing “media” range from traditional ones such as bookmarks, beer

mats, and coffee mugs to more contemporary versions such as mobile phone screensavers and

packets of garden seeds. Boldly promising “a new marketing ethos,” the company’s original

expertise was in working with public and voluntary sector organizations and campaigns, from

literacy to health or policing and safety. A short company profile articulates its blend of idealism

and commerce:

Community Media was first established in 1995, as a one-man operation, run from

home . . . Community Media has a talented, innovative and highly skilled design

team that bring together all elements of design to create thought-provoking and

visual designs. We also specialise in providing advertising, graphic design and

print management for voluntary and private sector organisations and have built up

a reputation for providing a quality, flexible and value for money service.

(www.communitymedia.co.uk; accessed June 25, 2007)

A progressive agenda is acknowledged by the company through drawing attention to its

work with the voluntary sector and local authorities, which functions also to distinguish its business

activity from the more purely capitalistic end of the public relations and advertising industries. The

purpose of the word “community” in the company title is to strengthen that difference and to

further signal its general worthiness and ethical awareness. Community Media, the business, offers

an illuminatingly ambivalent small-scale case study of ways in which “community” is employed in

the negotiation of political positioning, in the context of both the social community itself (in this

instance voluntary, local authority, implicitly socialist) and the commercial environment

(deliberately not part of the cutthroat world of advertising executives).

There are also global perspectives to something as apparently rooted as community media.

In Britain, a dedicated mainstream television facility was made available in 2000, initially as a

rather modest opportunity to air material produced by voluntary, charity, and burgeoning

community media organizations, “mainly showing charity advertisements and selling charity

merchandise.” Largely funded by the government, the Community Channel was quite rapidly

capitalized on as a means by which the television industry could display its credentials for

widening participation and for social inclusion. By 2004, all major British broadcasters had pledged

to support it—including BBC and ITV and Channels Four and Five as well as Sky and Discovery.

The joint declaration signed by these terrestrial and satellite broadcasters aimed “to make the

Community Channel a key external TV partner in our efforts to bring news, information and

enthusiasm about the work of the voluntary, charitable and community sectors to our viewers”

(www.communitychannel.org). They were joined 2 years later by transnational media

organizations, including MTV and Disney. The channel’s Web site explains to viewers that

Community Channel is TV that gives a damn. It makes you think again about the

world around you, and inspires you to take action on the causes and issues that

matter to you. Broadcasting original shows, the best of terrestrial TV and

showcasing the work of new directors and community programme makers,

Community Channel is the place for real-life stories. . . .

We receive free airtime from Sky, NTL, Telewest, and Freeview, and we thank

them for their support. (www.communitychannel.org/content/view/814/12/;

accessed June 25, 2007)

Fred Powell and Martin Geoghegan (2004) have identified the key responses to

globalization available to organizations involved in community development as

first, a rejectionist stance, based on critical alternative models of development that

seek to reclaim civil society for democracy; [and] second, a co-operative stance,

following an integrationist model based on co-operation in the “New Economy”

that draws community development into a partnership with government and

capital. (p. 4)

The Community Channel effectively tries to take both these stances at the same time. There

is, if not an outright rejection, then certainly a critical alternative on offer, both in the claim that the

channel broadcasts “TV that gives a damn” (note, too, the perhaps more powerful implication that

programming on the other channels from its sponsoring broadcasters might well not “give a

damn”), as well as its claim to transform its viewers into activist citizens focused on social “causes

and issues.” At the same time, incorporating the discourse and practice of community media in a

national and transnational media context, there is a clearly cooperative and integrationist model on

offer. Placing community media directly and even critically in a global media context, as the

Community Channel does, surely dramatizes for us the continuing stark yet crucial questions of

power and access within the industry. It should also remind us of ways in which the notion of

“community,” as understood by activists for social engagement and change, can be surprisingly

easily co-opted and deconstructed. Readers will and must evaluate for themselves the extent to

which such a pact is worth making, and what may be lost, in the chase for wider dissemination of

community television programs.

Conclusion

I have suggested in this chapter the extent to which, historically, community arts and music and,

more recently, community media, have existed in an ambivalent political space. We might simply

term that awkward and energetic space of politics and culture “community” itself. By cultural and

media community workers it is constructed pragmatically, if precariously—following funding

opportunities and in response to changes in governments and their policies—and idealistically,

from alternative media and radical arts for social change projects and interventions. We have seen

that it has also been constructed in a spirit of compromise, or indeed imposed as a label to mask

ideologically contradictory positions. My fundamental point is that it is essential for media scholars

to recognize in the term community media not only media issues, however important (or inflated)

these may be. We must also critically acknowledge the full weight of “community” as a cluster of

shorthand definitions, as a set of problems, yes, but as part of the wider and longer-lasting

movement for liberation and radical social change manifested in much community arts and

community music practice over the decades. Community media is part of this trajectory, even if it

also has its own specificities, not least of which may be a more complex set of negotiations around

questions of globalization in the media industry generally. However, as Gay Hawkins (quoted in

Cahill, 1998) has written (of the experience of the community arts movement in Australia):

Community is not something to be magically recovered but a goal to be struggled

for. It is not something to be manufactured by outside professionals but emerges

out of collaboration and shared commitment and expression. Cultural work is an

effective tool in the formation of community, it is a tool for activism. (p. 109)

As we have seen, the post-1997 “subsidy revolution”—a New Labor government committed

to more socially inclusive arts funding, urban regeneration via the engine of culture, and the funds

from the then new National Lottery to support such a “seismic” shift (Everitt, 1997, p. 157)—in

community arts in Britain saw specific cultural forms benefit significantly. These included

community music and community media.

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